The Informer: Visionaries�The Philanthropists

Jim Robbins reports on how latter-day land barons are carrying on the American tradition of checkbook conservation and taking it global.

A handful of wealthy environmentalists are snapping up the planet's last wild places for all of us to enjoy. Jim Robbins reports from Patagonia's Parque Pumalín on a pair of the radical rich who are saving the planet, one nature preserve at a time.

The drone of a small plane flying low over a still, slate bay cuts through the rain forest hush. A white Cessna appears, dwarfed by a massive cliff face draped in a curtain of vegetation broken only by a long, silvery thread of waterfall. My guide, Dagoberto Guzmán, looks up at the plane and says simply, "Kris." Moments later, another Cessna comes zooming in on the same flight path. Guzmán looks up. "Doug." Both planes bounce along a rain-slicked grass airstrip, and a few minutes later Doug Tompkins and his wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, officially welcome me to their Yosemite-size backyard: Chile's Parque Pumalín, the largest privately owned nature reserve on the planet.

Located about two-thirds of the way down Chile's crenellated coast, Pumalín is an isolated Eden of craggy, snowcapped peaks, dense vegetation that gives it a Jurassic Park feel, and long, Norwegian-style fjords. When I arrive in late February, the height of Chilean summer, I see penguins, dolphins, sea lions, and seals frolicking in Caleta Gonzalo, the glittering bay that doubles as the park's main entrance.

Tompkins and McDivitt Tompkins are the force behind what may be the most significant act of private conservation ever: The two former California bohemians are buying up and permanently protecting national park–size parcels of South American wilderness, an undertaking they describe as "paying rent" for living on the planet. Together, they have created nine his-and-her reserves across rugged expanses of Chile and Argentina. Pumalín, which is open to visitors year-round, at no charge, is the crown jewel.

Doug Tompkins, who made a fortune selling apparel and climbing gear, is the founder of the Conservation Land Trust, which has already helped deliver one turnkey national park into the hands of the Chilean government; he hopes someday to entrust Pumalín to the Chileans too. His wife, the former CEO of the Patagonia clothing company, runs Conservacion Patagonica (CP). In 2004, McDivitt Tompkins handed Argentina the species-rich Monte León National Park, on the Argentinian coast, and is at work restoring a second Argentinian park that will be even bigger. And CP is creating the giant Patagonia National Park that will open next year. (McDivitt Tompkins's foundation concentrates exclusively on Patagonia, while her husband's Conservation Land Trust works primarily farther north.)

"It is morally and ethically unthinkable not to work to reverse the extinction crisis," says Tompkins, explaining what motivates his conservation work. As he sees it, there is only one way to save the planet: "We need to change from an anthropocentric world to an ecocentric one. All species, from a beetle to a Siberian tiger, have a right to exist for their own sake. When it comes down to it, it's a religious position," he says, likening the preserves he and Kristine are creating to earthbound arks. "We reintroduced the giant anteater in our Esteros del Iberá preserve," McDivitt Tompkins adds proudly, referring to one of their projects on the pampas of Argentina. "It's the first species reintroduction in Argentinian history."

As remarkable as they are, the couple are just two in a long tradition of so-called checkbook conservationists: Americans who over the past century or so have decided to draw a line around property, forgo profit, and protect it—often at considerable personal and financial expense (see "Keeping It Green: The Early Years"). These days, the trend is growing, thanks to a small but powerful group of radical rich like Tompkins and his wife. They include everyone from Burt's Bees founder Roxanne Quimby, who donated 70,000 acres in Maine to help create a Maine Woods National Park, to secretive hedge-fund manager turned philanthropist David Gelbaum, who has donated an estimated $250 million to preserving wilderness, including the purchase of more than half a million acres in the California desert, perhaps the largest transfer of private land to public ownership in U.S. history.

But Tompkins and his wife are in a league of their own: They have single-handedly doubled the acreage of parks in Patagonia, purchasing 700,000 acres in Argentina and 1.4 million acres in Chile, and leveraged the protection of hundreds of thousands of additional acres.

"What Doug and Kris are doing in South America is nothing new," says Tom Butler, whose lavish book, Wildlands Philanthropy, was published in 2008 by Tompkins's Foundation for Deep Ecology. "But the scale on which they are doing it is off the charts. There's nothing like it in terms of acreage affected."

Not only are the couple footing most of the bill, but they are also hammering out complex deals with governments and working side by side with employees, which sets them apart from donors who simply write checks to organizations such as the Nature Conservancy.

Doug Tompkins's interest in the wild was apparent early on. Born into a privileged New York family in 1944, he was something of a misfit at private school. He dropped out and found a home in nature, becoming a top-notch skier and whitewater kayaker as well as an avid mountain climber who founded a climbing guide service. In 1964, he started the climbingequipment company the North Face, across from City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. In the 1970s, after divesting himself of the North Face, he founded the clothing company Esprit with his first wife, Susie. In the beginning, they sold clothes out of the back of a van.

As early as the 1980s, however, Tompkins was an anti-capitalist capitalist, attacking the practice of turning the earth into money even as he was getting rich. Today, he says, he is buying land and healing it, in part to make reparations for selling people things they didn't need. Disgusted with the corporate world, he sold his share of the company in 1989 for a reputed $150 million and decamped to South America, where he now lives year-round.

On my first morning in Pumalín, a cloud of blue smoke from the fireplace in the visitors center hangs over the small village named after the bay, and there's a light mist in the air. The buildings are exquisitely designed by Tompkins himself—in part, he says, to demonstrate to Chileans what a park can be. Park visitors can rent one of the six charming Hobbit-like cabins facing the bay, each covered in cedar shingles that are a hallmark of indigenous construction.

When my guide, Guzmán (who at the time was the park's superintendent), picks me up in an Isuzu Trooper to begin the tour, the night's ceaseless rain has finally stopped—the park receives more than 300 inches a year—and wispy, low-flying clouds threaten to snag on the branches of towering trees. We make the two-hour drive across the park on a road graveled with the ground black rock of past lava flows. Gin-clear streams slice through the foliage, and in the distance looms the snowcapped Chaitén volcano, which erupted in 2008, taking out much of the village of the same name next to the park. The town is slowly starting to be rebuilt by the Chilean government, and restoration efforts in the park, too, have been extensive.

We barrel past dense stands of bamboo and massive sword-shaped ferns that threaten to consume the road, until Guzmán stops the vehicle and suggests that we take a hike. Pulling on our rain gear against a downpour, we proceed on a rough-hewn wooden walkway to a grove of trees that dwarf us. These giant alerces, the sequoias of the Andes, are the heart of the park and what sparked Tompkins's devotion to the region.

In 1987, Rick Klein, the head of the U.S.-based conservation group Ancient Forest International, assumed that the alerce had gone the way of the dodo. Like other countries, Chile had ripped through its old-growth forests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cutting alerces, oaks, and other valuable species. "People thought it was extinct," Klein says. But someone told him of an area rumored to be rife with the trees. After hiking for several days through miles of near-impenetrable forest, he came to a hanging valley. "It was incredible," he says. "There were hundreds of them. I couldn't believe it. You had to wonder if a human had ever set foot there. We were walking on hallowed ground."

Klein wrote a letter to Tompkins and Patagonia founder and conservationist Yvon Chouinard, asking for help in buying 12,000 acres. Tompkins, who first visited Chile in 1961 and immediately fell in love with the country, came down with photographer Galen Rowell to see the alerces for himself. The next time Klein saw him, Tompkins said he'd bought the land. All 12,000 acres? Klein asked. No, Tompkins replied—some 700,000 acres. These are the trees I am standing before.

The main theme at Pumalín, as at his other reserves, is biodiversity, a goal that Tompkins and McDivitt Tompkins have taken to heart. With help from Chouinard and others, they established the 200,000-acre Patagonia National Park, which will eventually grow to 650,000 acres with the addition of hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands. The park was created in large part to protect the huemul deer—featured on the Chilean national crest—whose numbers are thought to be fewer than 1,000. At their 350,000-acre Esteros del Iberá nature reserve—a massive, species-rich network of lakes, marshes, and wetlands—they are reintroducing not only giant anteaters but marsh deer, giant river otters, and eventually jaguars. In 15 or 20 years, they expect it to be Argentina's largest national park. They hope that the richness of birds at Esteros del Iberá will attract birdwatchers, and they have built an ecolodge where visitors can stay.

Money can buy land, of course, but not necessarily good will. Chaitén, the gateway community at Pumalín, was once a hotbed of opposition to Tompkins and McDivitt Tompkins's eco-empire. Emotions have cooled considerably, in large measure because of their efforts to generate a green economy in this remote part of the world. All told, they have created more than 200 jobs in and around their parks, where locals are restoring the land, working on the couple's farm, and weaving textiles to sell to visitors. It's all part of a culture of parks and preservation that Tompkins is trying to create in Chile. "It takes a long time to convince Chileans of the importance of parks," he told me. "But 50,000 have come through Pumalín, and some are quite influential."

Even so, the fact that Tompkins's land runs the entire width of narrow Chile, from the Pacific Ocean to the Argentinian border, has caused no end of nationalistic angst. He has received numerous death threats but says that the nationalistic furor is misplaced. "We're not foreignizing the land, we're nationalizing it," he says.

Not everyone sees it that way or appreciates Tompkins's take-no-prisoners approach to conservation. "He's stubborn and inflexible. He doesn't move off his idea," says Chilean senator Antonio Horvath, one of the cooler heads and a friend of Tompkins's. Klein says that Chile's elite sees Tompkins as a "turncoat." Indeed, the ruling class has been among his most ardent foes.

South America has a long tradition of concentrating most of the wealth in the hands of a few with little thought to philanthropy. What, then, to make of a gringo selflessly giving away all that he has to the people for parks? Yet things have changed a bit among members of the ruling class: Tompkins's example convinced former president Sebastián Piñera to create Tantauco Park, a nearly 300,000-acre private preserve open to the public for camping and hiking on the island of Chiloé off the Chilean coast, where visitors can see whales, foxes, and other wildlife.

Parque Pumalín is a blueprint for a post-petroleum ecotopia that Tompkins has created—wilderness surrounding humans living on animal-powered farms, eating organic meats and vegetables, and caring for the soil and water. It's this "eco-localism," as Tompkins calls it, that will survive the species collapse that many predict—collapse hastened by a crazy economy which depends on flying farm-raised salmon from Chile to Japan. He's been accused of hypocrisy for his wealth, the fleet of planes, the tractors, and even the DVD projector and computer on the coffee table. But his use of these things is a "strategic embrace," he says. "They will someday have to go," he tells me with a wave of his hand.

Tompkins has been brutally frank with the Chilean business community, attacking salmon farms (which he calls "hog farms") that pollute the ocean by concentrating waste. The huge dam projects that will plug half the region's glacier-fed rivers to generate electricity for yet more growth are a topic of one of Tompkins's crusading books. "We're controversial because we're activists," he explains. "If you have the activist strain, you just have to do something. We own a lot of land. We like big areas. And as any conservation biologist will tell you, you can't make them big enough."

It is a complex and expensive matter to create a national park, and Tompkins says he is done buying big tracts for now and will be tending to what he owns. Visitors to these places are key to the couple's conservation strategy. By creating a green economy with guiding, ecotourism, and restoration, they hope to show Chileans, Argentines, and the world that preservation can mean a sustainable and secure economic future.

But despite the efforts of Tompkins and others, heading off a collapse of biodiversity is going to take more than just deep pockets. "Land conservation through purchase will always be important, but it's not all-encompassing," says the Nature Conservancy's lead scientist, M. A. Sanjayan, who has worked to establish parks and preserves worldwide. "It's expensive, for one thing. We need to find a way to conserve land where human activity is dominant—that's the trick. Otherwise, these preserves are islands."

Tompkins recognizes the challenge and says we can and must find a way to live that doesn't destroy the soil and the water, that doesn't decimate species, and that doesn't turn our planet into what he calls "a coffin space." Changing the way we live is "not fighting progress," he says, "it's making it."